Was Jefferson Really a Racist?

Notes on the State of Virginia is
Jefferson’s only book, yet scholars seldom carefully read it from
cover to cover, and it is mostly used by scholars as a grab bag from
which they cull items concerning Jefferson’s views on certain
subjects—e.g., agrarianism, meteorology, population growth,
paleontology, biotic classification, mineralogy, slavery, race, and
religion. Those who have made the book an object of study have in
general paid scant attention to the empirical bent of the book—viz.,
Jefferson’s use of scientific description and explanation as well
as hypothesis testing.

Without question,
Jefferson’s Notes is most popularly used to pin down and
denigrate Jefferson on the issues of race and slavery. In doing so,
Jefferson’s views on both issues are seldom placed in the
etiological context in which they were intended.

One such instance
is that of Ari Helo and Peter Onuf in their paper, “Jefferson,
Morality, and the Problem of Slavery.” They write that black
slaves, due to their bondage, were for Jefferson morally inferior to
whites. The “bad behavior of slaves” was due to their
“disposition to theft.” They sum, “[Jefferson] was chronicling
the corruption in morals in a population that had yet to cross the
threshold of national identity and moral responsibility.”

Jefferson’s
account of blacks in Query XIV begins with a description of their
physical and moral characteristics. An “immoveable veil of
black”—emanating from the reticular membrane in the scarf-skin or
between the skin and scarf-skin, from the color of the blood or the
bile, or from some other source—conceals their emotions and is
“eternally monotonous.” They are of less “elegant symmetry of
form” and do not have flowing hair. They sweat more than whites,
“which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor,” but makes them
more tolerant of heat and less of cold. They need less sleep, and sit
up till midnight even after a hard day’s work. They are more
adventuresome and at least as brave as whites, but those things might
be due to “want of foresight.” More passionate with their women,
they are also less tender and delicate. They grieve transiently, and
live more by sensation than by reflection. They are more gifted than
whites in music—“with accurate ears for tune and time”—yet it
is not yet known whether they are capable of a “more extensive run
of melody” or of “complicated harmony.”

Upon the whole,
the description, driven by observation as well as assimilation of the
skewed views of Enlightenment naturalists—e.g., Cuvier, Buffon, and
Goldsmith—who ranked the varied “races” of men according to
skin color (from white to black, with white being superior), is
certainly not favorable. Jefferson’s conclusion—“that they are
inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination”—is certainly
also not favorable. Such things readily lend themselves to critical
condemnation by today’s scholars. Jefferson’s prejudices color
his observations. Jefferson is racist.

Not so fast. We
have yet to look at Jefferson’s views of the morality of blacks.
Here, let us return to Query XIV, and in doing so, let us keep in
mind the condemnatory comments of Helo and Onuf.

Jefferson writes,
“In those [endowments] of the heart she [Nature] will be found to
have done them justice.” He continues, “We find among them
numerous instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as among
their better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and
unshaken fidelity.” Turning to the disposition toward theft to
which Helo and Onuf refer, Jefferson states: “That disposition to
theft with which they have been branded, must be ascribed to their
situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense. The man,
whose favour no laws of property exist, probably feels himself less
bound to respect those made in favour of others.” He ends with a
problem in the form of a rhetorical question. May not a slave
“justifiably take a little from one, who has taken all from him, as
he may slay one who would slay him?” The account paints blacks the
moral equals of all others. Helo and Onuf’s assessment of
Jefferson’s view of the moral inferiority of blacks comes from a
skewed reading of Query XIV and is unsustainable.

That Jefferson
concedes the moral equality of blacks with non-blacks might seem
exiguous—like throwing a bone to a starving dog after one has
picked it of its meat—but it is not. It is a prodigious, weighty
concession that has never been addressed in the literature. Why? No
one has ever done an exhaustive study of the relationship between
Jefferson’s faculty of reason and that of his moral sense.

Though Jefferson
writes of rationality and moral sensitivity as separate faculties
with separate natural “assignments” in his lengthy billet doux
to Maria Cosway (12 Oct. 1786), it is clear by his description of the
tasks naturally assigned to reason—to square the circle, to trace
the orbit of a comet, and to investigate the solid of least
resistance—that they are relatively insignificant for daily living
and relatively inaccessible to the average person. In contrast, the
tasks naturally assigned to the moral sense—actions based on
feelings of sympathy, benevolence, gratitude, justice, love, and
friendship—comprise the lion’s share of a person’s daily
activities and are accessible to all. The notion that moral activity
is independent of reason is iterated, for instance, in letters to
Peter Carr (12 Oct. 1787), Rev. James Fishback (27 Sept. 1809), and
Thomas Law (13 June 1814).

In many letters,
Jefferson is clear that reason is a faculty that is subservient to
morality—a sentiment derived from the Scottish moral-sense or
moral-sentiment theorists such as Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and Kames
that Jefferson read and assimilated. In another letter to Peter Carr
(19 Aug. 1785), Jefferson advises his nephew to give up all things,
even science, “rather than do an immoral act.” He adds: “I can
assure you, that the possession of [science] is, what (next to an
honest heart [morality]) will above all things render you dear to
your friends, and give you fame and promotion in your own country. …
An honest heart being the first blessing, a knowing head is the
second.” He tells John Randolph (1 Dec. 1803): “I see too many
proofs of the imperfection of human reason, to entertain wonder or
intolerance at any difference of opinion on any subject; and
acquiesce in that difference as easily as on a difference of feature
or form.” Years later, he ingeminates the sentiment in a letter to
Edward Livingston (4 Apr. 1824):“These [political] cares
[in retirement]… are no longer mine. I resign myself cheerfully to
the managers of the ship, and the more contentedly, as I am near the
end of my voyage. I have learned to be less confident in the
conclusions of human reason.” Finally, Jefferson congratulates
Edward Jenner (14 May 1806) for the doctor’s vaccine for yellow
fever. “Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood was a
beautiful addition to our knowledge of the animal economy, but on a
review of the practice of medicine before & since that epoch, I
do not see any great amelioration which has been derived from that
discovery, you have erased from the Calendar of human afflictions one
of it’s greatest.” In short, Harvey’s discovery cannot, as yet,
be put to any moral use; it is merely a discovery of interest to the
head.

In sum, the moral
sense is a much more significant faculty than reason, because reason
is given to too few persons; because few human actions are
adiaphorous,
while most are moral; because the discoveries of reason, not in the
service of moral ends, are vagarious; reason is readily used for dark
reasons (e.g., politically motivated clerics); and because reason is
not the motive of morally correct actions, but the cause of immoral
human actions, when it interferes with the moral sense.

We come now to a
stout question. Why would Jefferson, if racist, concede the moral
equality of blacks with non-blacks, given his view of the superiority
of the moral sense vis-à-vis reason? To do so, it seems, would be to
make an elephantine concession, which no racist would be likely to
make. One answer suggests itself: Jefferson’s analysis of blacks in
his Notes was not prejudicial, but—like his analysis of the
“Big Buffalo,” Native Americans and their barrows and origins,
petrified shells on tops of mountains, Virginia’s caves, syphon
fountains, the animals of Virginia, the unexplained phenomenon of
looming, and the dew inside brick and stone walls—empirically
driven.

If so, we must
take Jefferson at his word when he writes of the infeasibility of
empirical generalizations: “The opinion, that [blacks] are inferior
in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with
great diffidence. To justify a general conclusion, requires many
observations.” While blacks and Native Americans have been the
observed for some 150 years, “they have never yet been viewed by us
as subjects of natural history.” Thus, we can do no other than
“advance it … as a suspicion only, that the blacks … are
inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
The suspicion, of course, has not stood the test of time, but
Jefferson would have happily acknowledged his empirically driven
misjudgment, had he been alive today.